IV Iron Use Among Australian Women Surges 17-Fold in Decade

Over a single decade, the number of Australian women receiving intravenous iron infusions grew seventeen times over — a shift that speaks both to a long-overdue reckoning with iron deficiency's toll on women's lives and to the uneven terrain on which medical progress tends to unfold. By 2024, one in twenty women of reproductive age had received the treatment, and public spending had climbed from $1.1 million to more than $82 million. Researchers now ask whether this surge reflects genuine progress in care or whether it quietly encodes new inequities — in geography, in cost, and in who is able